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ABSTRACT Scott, Amy Nicole. Sovereign Amity and Mimetic Rivalry: Shakespeare’s Roman Masculinities. (Under the direction of Barbara Baines.) In recent years gender criticism in Renaissance studies has begun to focus on issues of masculinity. The “woman question” has given way to the “man question”: that is, an examination of masculine gender construction in the repressive regime of Renaissance gender ideology. In early modern English culture it is surely a disadvantage to be a woman. According to the ideology, women are leaky vessels: they bleed uncontrollably, have an excess of fluids, and also cannot hold their tongues. Multiple early modern discourses insist that women cannot control their sexual appetites: they will make a cuckold of a man. Anatomically, women are deformed, incomplete men: female genitalia are conceived of as inverted male genitalia, lacking enough “heat” to descend. And women are commodities in an economy of exchange between fathers (and brothers) and husbands. However, in some ways it is just as horrifying to be a male subject in this gender regime. Literature of the period betrays an obsessive concern with controlling female chastity. This is not surprising, of course, in a patriarchal /patrilineal society in which property and title follow blood-lines and fatherhood never carries the same physiological certainty as motherhood. As Mark Breitenberg argues in Anxious Masculinity, masculinity becomes synonymous with anxiety. This thesis examines the attempt, in drama of the early modern period, to retrieve masculinity from that anxiety via the celebration of the male/male bond in the form of sovereign amity. Sovereign amity, referring to the rhetoric of Renaissance friendship in which the friend is figured as the other-self and in which the friends achieve a kind of “sovereignty” vis-à-vis their bond, requires a radical likeness between subjects. Ironically, it is the very same likeness that engenders mimetic rivalry. Mimetic rivalry seeks to annihilate the same radical likeness which sovereign amity celebrates. This thesis focuses first on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the play most appropriate for examining the correlation between sovereign amity and masculinity. The discussion then explores Antony and Cleopatra, the political sequel to Julius Caesar, to see what happens to sovereign amity in the face of heterosexual desire and mimetic rivalry. I am interested in these particular plays because of the way in which they foreground notions of sovereign amity and its inverse, mimetic rivalry, in relation to masculinity. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare offers a fleeting glimpse of the achievement of ideal of sovereign amity. This portrayal collapses, however, under the very real pressures of social and political hierarchies in Antony and Cleopatra, as sovereign amity gives way to mimetic rivalry. Ultimately sovereign amity proves to be a dream impossible to sustain in an intensely hierarchical culture. SOVEREIGN AMITY AND MIMETIC RIVALRY: SHAKESPEARE’S ROMAN MASCULINITIES by AMY NICOLE SCOTT A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts ENGLISH Raleigh 2003 APPROVED BY: ________________________ ________________________ Dr. Christopher Cobb Dr. Marsha Orgeron ________________________ Dr. Barbara Baines, Chair of Advisory Committee DEDICATION Stephen M. Scott Ernie Stitzinger Sharon B. Scott Thank you for infinite varieties of support. ii BIOGRAPHY Amy Nicole Scott was born on August 4, 1972, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Growing up, Amy (and her family) lived in twelve houses in ten cities and six states before she graduated from Bakersfield High School in 1990. She left Bakersfield, CA to attend her father’s alma mater, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. After changing colleges five times and majors three times, Amy earned a BA in English from the University of California Santa Barbara, graduating with highest honors and distinction within the major. Amy left beautiful Santa Barbara for Raleigh, NC to be closer to her mother and to live with her best friend. After a brief, miserable “career” in non-profit, Amy decided to pursue graduate studies in English at North Carolina State University, where she had been awarded a teaching assistantship. During her time at NCSU, Amy was inducted in Phi Kappa Phi honor society, served as Treasurer and founding member of AEGIS, received one of twenty University Outstanding Teaching Assistant Awards, and was accepted to the PhD program in English at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where she plans to continue studies in Renaissance literature. This thesis marks the completion of the Master’s Program, culminating in the awarding of the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to Dr. Barbara Baines for her careful consideration, attention to detail, and endless advice. She has been a mentor, sounding board, staunch supporter, and source of inspiration from the very beginning of my graduate studies. As both her student and teaching assistant, I have learned more from her than I can enumerate here. I am also indebted to Dr. Christopher Cobb and Dr. Marsha Orgeron for their thoughtful input during this process. Thank you to the members of the Southeastern Renaissance Conference for their responses to my chapter on Julius Caesar and to The Renaissance Papers for selecting that chapter for publication. I am also appreciative to Dr. M. Thomas Hester for the guidance he offered while I served as his teaching assistant. I owe more thanks than I can express to my fiancé, Ernie Stitzinger, who scoffed at all my excuses and encouraged me relentlessly. Thanks also to my friends, especially Dana Lawrence and Jerry Jeffrey, and also to Beth, Thomas, Kristin, Thad, Kim and Shelly, who offered plenty of encouragement (and libations) and listened patiently to my incessant ramblings about Shakespeare, masculinity, Roman plays and early modern culture. Finally, and most importantly, I am grateful to my family for their love, support, and patience. Mom, Dad, Connie, Zachery, Geoffrey and Ernie, I love you. iv CONTENTS page I. Introduction 1 II. “Romans, countrymen and lovers”: Performing Politics, Sovereign Amity and Masculinity in Julius Caesar 7 III. “[A] pair of chaps—no more”: Mimetic Rivalry and the Dissolution of Amity in Antony and Cleopatra 27 IV. Conclusion 47 Notes 55 Bibliography 61 v 1 I Introduction In recent years gender criticism in Renaissance studies has begun to focus on issues of masculinity. The “woman question” has given way to the “man question”: that is, an examination of masculine gender construction in the repressive regime of Renaissance gender ideology. 1 In early modern English culture it is surely a disadvantage to be a woman. According to the ideology, women are leaky vessels: they bleed uncontrollably, have an excess of fluids, and also cannot hold their tongues. Multiple early modern discourses insist that women cannot control their sexual appetites: they will make a cuckold of a man. Anatomically, women are deformed, incomplete men: female genitalia are conceived of as inverted male genitalia, lacking enough “heat” to descend.2 And women are commodities in an economy of exchange between fathers (and brothers) and husbands. Ian Maclean’s survey The Renaissance Notion of Woman examines early modern woman in theological, medical, ethical, and legal discourses of the period. Theologically, woman is, of course, cursed by the Fall, to which she, as woman, is particularly susceptible: St. Antoninus Forciglioni’s alphabet of female vices… encompasses almost the whole domain of sin, and suggests that not only are the vices listed found in woman, but also that they hold greater sway over her than over man. This alphabet is well known in the Renaissance, and appears in Spanish, French, English and Dutch versions, usually without reference to its scholastic source.3 2 Medical discourses, though evolving, rely heavily on the principles of Aristotle and Galen, which imply congruence between male and female genitalia. Although most anatomists seem to abandon the notion of parallelism with regards to understanding sex difference by the end of the sixteenth century, early modern culture has inherited an anatomical tradition grounded in an Aristotelian classification based on polarities and opposites.4 The supposed biological sex differences have, for early modern culture, “psychological implications.” According to the Historia animalium: In all genera in which the distinction of male and female is found, Nature makes a similar differentiation in the mental characteristics of the sexes… the female is softer in character, is the sooner tamed, admits more readily to caressing… softer in disposition, more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive…the male, on the other hand, is more spirited than the female, more savage, more simple and less cunning… the nature of man is most rounded off and complete, and consequently in man the qualities or capacities above referred to are found in their perfection. Hence woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike. She is, furthermore, more prone to despondency… more void of shame or self- respect, more false of speech, more deceptive...5 Given the ideology of woman in the period, it is not surprising, then, that the bonds men forge with other men occupy a privileged position in literary discourse. However, in some ways it is arguably just as horrifying to be a male subject in this gender regime. Literature of the period betrays an obsessive concern with controlling 3 female chastity. This is not surprising, of course, in a patriarchal /patrilineal society in which property and title follow blood-lines and fatherhood never carries the same physiological certainty as motherhood. As Mark Breitenberg argues: Masculine subjectivity constructed and sustained by a patriarchal culture—infused with patriarchal assumptions about power, privilege, sexual desire, the body—inevitably engenders varying degrees of anxiety in its male members.